How about hydraulic wind turbines?

This interesting alternative design offers advantages but also has drawbacks

Wind-powered turbines are a viable, but complex, approach to generating renewable power, we all know that. The standard configuration has the blades connected to and turning the generator through a gearbox, with the entire assembly mounted up on the tower. While this certainly works, it puts a lot of weight and complex electromechanical "stuff" up in the nacelle, which adds to tower-construction and overall maintenance issues.

A recent article in Machine Design discussed an interesting alternative approach. The article, "Hydraulic Wind Turbines?", explained and discussed having the blades turn a hydraulic pump in the nacelle, and have the pumped fluid then drive a generator at the base.

The author pointed out that this is a tried-and-true approach, and with significant industry engineering experience, but on a smaller scale. In fact, the best thing about the article was that it presented the pros and cons of the hydraulic design in terms of cost, efficiency, scaling, and other factors. It did not say that this approach is always or even usually better, only that it might be better in some circumstances and should be considered.

This is what engineering is really about: looking as objectively as possible at ways to solve a problem honestly admitting the unknowns of challenges, and recognizing that the standard, "conventional wisdom" solution may not be the right choice. It's all about the tradeoffs and priorities, not blindly implementing the common approach before considering if viable and better alternatives are available.♦

Now consider a wind turbine site near a salt cavern.
Use the salt cavern as a compressed air storage energy storage device.
Add a hybrid hydraulic-electric-aircompressor.
Any two can be connected or all three. when wind energy exceeds electrical demand, excess energy is used to compress air storage.
When low-no wind present air storage provides electrical base load demand.
Complex system ground based, tower and nacelle low cross section and weight-size-cost.
Cool stuff when do we get started building one?

Compressed air energy storage? Wow. Go back to your physics and thermodynamics classes but before you do, be sure to take of the green colored glasses. You can start building one when you find enough suckers, I mean investors to pay for it.

Add heat exchangers, turbo expanders, effiecency comes back up.
Large size offsets costs. Standardization on a few sizes also reduces costs.
Go to the thing called the web and look up salt dome and the time constants associated with its size. Note the load leveling capability of such a large volume.
"Waste heat from large dynamic input power being converted to compressed air can be recycled with heat exchanges into constant-near constant output for loads.
Air and oil hybrid can cahnge modes allowing for compressables to be "air blader" for oil.
Dream a little Mr. pessimism or go help clean up the oil disaster because people like you are keeping us now and in the past from becoming more energy independent We now are subsidizing terroism via oil purchases from terorist friendly countries, environmental disasters, and national economic drain (less value/$ ) due to trade deficits.